On Wed, 03 Sep 2003 14:33:47 GMT, Ed Rasimus
wrote:

Cub Driver wrote:


Now much did you get for "When Thunder Rolled"? Had to be what 2-3 million

Smithsonian Institution Press regards itself as a university press.
You do it for the honor of the thing.

Say Jessie's book sells for $24.95, and so does Ed's, and say that
they both get 10 percent royalties on the first 5,000 copies. (Jessie
may in fact do better than that.) Sounds like even money, huh? If only
it were so!

Knopf does the math this way: 10 percent of $24.95 is $2.495 per book.

SIP as a higher-math university press figures: okay, we had to give up
50 percent to the distributor, so we got $12.475 per book times 10
percent to the author is $1.2475 per book, or half as much.

I majored in guvmint, so it took me years to figure that out.

all the best -- Dan Ford

I notice that your excellent work on the AVG is showing in the Fall
'03 Catalog of Smithsonian as a past catalog, "Best Seller"--still in
print, still available, still a good read.

See, stop your belly-achin, the money keeps dribblin' in.

But, for the uninitiated, you've concisely spelled out the royalties
equation. Most folks are surprised.


I know several people who write aviation history books. All but one
have day jobs that pay real wages. You almost have to be a writing
machine to make even a meager living from writing aviation history
books or magazine articles. The press run for these books may not be
very large, and it can be disheartening for an author to see their
quarterly or semi-annual sales figures - some of these books sell far
less than 100 copies per quarter.

It might as well be a hobby for many of these authors - the amount of
time spent researching a subject, dealing with archives, and tracking
down people/documents/photographs (much less finding a publisher)
costs much more than what the resultant book will ever repay for.

John Hairell )